Origins 2025 Coverage – The AAR

Armchair Dragoons PAO, 7 July 2025

Origins 2025 was our biggest, busiest, and buzziest yet. Our head count of both players and GMs went through the roof, and our area expanded for the 3rd straight year. As we do with all of our major events, we bring you an after-action report on what happened, so you can either (1) marvel at our brilliance, or more likely (2) chuckle at our predictable mistakes.

Last year’s Origins AAR included a handful of specific points that we wanted to improve for this year, as well as a couple things that worked we that we wanted to ensure were repeated. While you don’t necessarily need to read that one to follow what we’re discussing here, we will address most of those bullet points.

Prep & Planning

Once we realized how much space we were going to need for this year’s events, we got to coordinating with GAMA early about the floorspace & tables needed, and the layout of it. We’ve never been all that particular about where in the gaming hall we’re located — grognards are gonna find us! — but we wanted to make sure we have enough concrete to contain all the fun we had planned.

The concepts we’ve held to for the past several years were as follows, with this year’s adjustments in red

Visually attractive games to the corners to maximize walk-by traffic exposure
CPX / Kriegsspiel table(s) in the middle
Admin table co-located with the CPX table for access to the power cords (no CPX this year meant the power cord was less of an issue)
5×8 table for the big running game (no “big game” but still had some larger footprints)
Several tables set aside for specific companies to run their own schedule / control their own events

What we ended up with was largely the following:

The front of the main gaming hall was off to the left of this image. The north end of the hall, with the exit doors out to Gooddale St is off the top of this image

most images can click to enlarge

For our planning, we labeled a bunch of the tables with a reference point, and then put the games in the most logical places from there.

This year, GMT went from 1 shared table to 3 full tables (2 of them manned by GMT-provided GMs), and Decision Games went from a shared table to two of their own. With the increase in space we were able to set aside tables exclusively for the Kriegsspiels, and also used them for Major’s Gambit as it has some double-blind elements, too. We’ve always been friendly to playtest and in-development wargames, but this year we grouped a bunch of those onto a single table into our own insurgent “unpub” program.

The one adjustment we had to make on-the-ground was around the admin/raffle tables. The booth ‘off-screen’ to the left of this diagram was Catalyst Games and their big-ass Battletech game-and-retail area, with a giant black curtain across the aisle from us, which meant our admin/welcome table would be virtually invisible to people coming into the show. To solve this, we flipped the admin and raffle tables, and seated the admin team so they faced into the booth which gave them good visibility on what was happening at any one time, but unfortunately did not situate them where they could also act as a “welcome desk” for incoming gamers.
To be improved for 2026: reposition the admin & raffle tables into the middle of a “long side” of the space for better coverage of the area and more central “welcome” spot.

From last years “to be improved” items during the prep & planning, we also had:

To be improved for 2025: provide Origins with both the list of events, and the specific tables on our layout where they are to be held.
We actually did this. Origins ignored the table assignments we provided them. Once we realized this, we changed our table signage to get rid of the mis-matched table numbers, and labeled them similar to what’s on our working diagram. This meant we didn’t have people going to the wrong table number, but we still had to direct more traffic than we planned¹.
To be improved for 2025: ensure Origins event crew are notified well in advance of the “Dragoons” room at the War College, and maintain the integrity of the schedule we provide them.
This actually worked out much, much better. We programmed one entire room at the Origins War College for three days, and we were able to maintain “ownership” of that room at the War College for the duration of the convention. There’s other things to refine about the War College (see below) but this was a problem we were able to fix.

The process we started to institutionalize over the past 2 years has worked for us, and at this point it’s “refinement” rather than “reinvention”

Our Events

Again, our volunteer GMs² are the lifeblood of our program, and without those guys, nothing happens. As we start planning our events, we give the GMs some pretty wide latitude as to what they’d like to present, and try not to impose specific constraints on them other than the occasional “hey, we could really use a game from X company to help support them”

Back from previous years

The Kriegsspiel
PicoArmor Panzerblitz
One of GMT’s ’40-x series games (this year was Holland ’44)
Three companies with their specific titles (Catastrophe, Fort Circle, Dietz, Invicta Rex)
The raffle!

New this year

Several additional publishers joining the fray, though not necessarily on their own dedicated tables (GMT Games, Ares, High Flying Dice, Decision, Wharf Rat, Wehrlegig)
The dedicated Unpub table
Official Star Fleet Battles events

Missing this year

The CPX — the team had some schedule conflicts
A split-table COIN game — Brant was already overwhelmed
A dedicated minis table — GM had a family event interfere
Some form of rolling monster game — GMs wanted to do some other stuff

The big challenge this year was just sheer volume: adding several publishers and increasing the numbers of tables for them meant a concurrent jump in our coordination of schedules, paperwork, and people management.
To be improved for 2026: start even earlier with blocking off game time slots on tables, and tentative names against them, to get the schedule draft started even earlier.
To be improved for 2026: nail down necessary space with GAMA/Origins, as it’s entirely probable we expand again.

From last years “to be improved” items on Events, we also had:

To be improved for 2025: shorten our part of the event title just to “Armchair Dragoons:___”
Easy to do, and we did it. People can still find our events. They’re blocked together in the schedule as a unified program. Easier to filter in the tabletop.events website.
To be improved for 2025: add events for WED/SUN, plus Star Fleet Battles.
We put over a dozen events on Wednesday and filled a lot of them. We also added 5 others on Sunday morning and had players in all of them. This also meant pushing back the raffle by 2 hours, but it was worth it to get the additional games on tables.
We put 2 SFB games on the schedule at 6 hours each, and they were both over-filled.
To be improved for 2025: explore the designation of tables as a dedicated wargaming Unpub program.
While it wasn’t a formal “Unpub” program, the idea of a dedicated table for those games really worked out, and now we need to look at refining the communication around that table so players have a sense of what’s in front of them, and possibly some better feedback tools for the companies to gather info from the players.
To be improved for 2025: aim low for ‘big’ events and over-fill them if needed.
This mostly happened. We did overshoot on the Kriegsspiels again, and will adjust that as time goes on. But with no CPX’s or multi-table COIN games on the schedule, we were able to keep this problem largely under wraps.

As always, Origins requires us to turn in our event slips for each game, along with either the player tickets or a record of the walk-up players. Like last year, we also kept our own record of attendance for those games so we wouldn’t have to wait until October for our attendance numbers. Unlike last year, we missed recording a couple of those game numbers before the slips were turned in.

This year, what we have attendance numbers on 157 games³ and totaled 468 players. Attendance totals do not include our War College events.

This event count *does* include our War College events for the years we offered them

This is part of our comprehensive coverage of The 2025 Origins Game Fair from GAMA; you can find the links to all published articles at the end of each one

Player Feedback

Each year, we ask for feedback from our players to help us improve the Wargame HQ for the following year. We used a combination of QR code links to the player survey, as well as messages through the tabletop.events system to contact as many players as we could to get their feedback for our program.

As always, we repeat come questions from previous years to allow us the ability to track those responses over the years. We ask players to rate both the specific event in which they played, and the overall Wargame HQ. This does mean that we’re going to have some repeat responses for the latter, if someone played in multiple events with us.
We do pass the feedback on to the GMs, too, so they can see how the players rated their experience, but also so they can read the player comments.

We use a 1-6 scale⁴, which gives players some decent granularity for how much they liked it, but also doesn’t give them a “true neutral” data point where they can be non-committal.

Event-Specific Feedback

Overall individual event rankings for 2025, with 172 total responses

How does that compare over time?

This is our lowest year, but also our busiest for both games, and feedback. It’s possible we had players in other years who were equally unimpressed, but because we didn’t push the survey as heavily, never responded to us.

Our top-rated events⁵?

Red Dust Rebellion – 6.0 from 7 votes
Kriegsspiel – 6.0 from 3 votes
Commands & Colors Ancients – 5.66 from 3 votes
First Monday in October – 5.66 from 3 votes
Star Fleet Battles – 5.66 from 3 votes
We Are Coming Nineveh – 5.66 from 3 votes
Microverse – 5.2 from 5 votes
Red Dragon/Green Crescent (Learn & Play) – 5.0 from 3 votes

Some player comments from those events?

Red Dust Rebellion

Very deep and thinky war game. I love the changes from the traditional coin format and we couldn’t have had a better instructor.

Kriegsspiel

A unique gaming experience and a ton of fun. The fog of war created by the umpired system is a really fun challenge.

Commands & Colors Ancients

Great teacher. Easy to understand. Answered questions.

First Monday in October

Good GM, good opponents, what more could I ask for?

Star Fleet Battles

I had a lot of fun playing SFB, a gamew that I haven’t played in years. I would be happy to do it again.

We Are Coming Nineveh

Well run. Teach by Ian was very good. Great gaming experience.

Microverse

Great flow, easy rules with the feel of a bigger game

Red Dragon/Green Crescent

Great introductory gaming experience.

Wargame HQ Overall Feedback

You love to see it when there’s nothing in the 1-2 range!

How does that track over time?

Second-highest ever, which is great. And consistently above “5” which is also great.

Repeat customers — do we get players coming back year over year? We are still getting first-time players with us every year. It is possible that some of these folks had played some games with us back when we were flying another flag in our area, too, and they don’t realize it’s the same wargaming team since 2014.

Finally, we do ask about awareness of the Armchair Dragoons, since part of the reason we do this is to boost our profile along with wargaming as a whole. It seems we’ve still got quite a bit of work to do on branding for our community.

Overall player comments on the Wargame HQ?

Here are some positives

The expansion of this there was great. Really enjoyed the extra space and tables!	Responsiveness and friendliness are top notch
Great area, I’m generally not a war gamer but I’ll definitely be back if another game interests me	Love the way you guys are helpful and informative about your games . Positive energy
Loved the location. My event started on time and the GM did a nice job. I will definitely be back next year!	Well-organized events and friendly volunteers. And a generally fun atmosphere.
Really liked the wide variety of events. Did miss the monster game setup, but understand the time commitment to it.	I like their continued efforts to bring board wargames back to Origins.

And of course, there were some negatives, and they do bring up some good points!

For instance, we heard a few different comments about our raffle.⁶

I would have like to participate in the raffle, but I was not able to be present to win. (Sad trombone.).	No complaints, I wished I was there on Sunday for the drawing but maybe next year.
I understand why the giveaway was on Sunday, but am disappointed by it. As someone who drives to and from PA, Sunday is drive day. Requiring folks to be present and no shipping is disappointing. Still, its a good thing you do and I gave my ticket to my opponent, who was a great person to play against.	The bit with the raffle tickets could have been handled more efficiently. Some people didn’t get tickets without having to ask for them. But since I could not stay until the drawing, it was a moot point for me!

To be improved for 2026: If we have multiple copies of a game in the raffle, we’ll hold a Saturday drawing in the late afternoon for one of each of those, to give people driving on Sunday a chance to win something. We will work out the specific process for that mini-raffle, but we don’t want to penalize people for having to drive home before work on Monday.

There were also comments about GM preparedness that we need to address with some of our publisher partners, and there are valid points to be made about the table signage (Origins didn’t help with that, but we still could’ve done better).
Finally, we got comments about how to identify the publishers of the games or the expertise level needed for them, but both of those are part of the event listings, so maybe we just need to teach people how to read the full event description on tabletop.events?

Booth Operations

We need to improve some things for ourselves, too.

Last year’s sustain / improve from our team gave us these bullets, with some commentary in red

2024’s “Some things to sustain for next year”

Admin support for the GM team, with a dedicated non-GM for handling event slips, signage, raffle tickets, etc. (maintained, and even expanded, though we’ll need more dedicated help next year with even more expansion)
Event variety by game type, historical era, event length, etc (we cast an even wider net this year!)
Multiple live social media hits throughout the day (didn’t do as well this year and need to expand in 2026)

2024’s “Some things to improve for next year”

Integration with the Origins War College (better, but still needs improving, including signs at both ends of this arrangement)
Welcome station / more obvious ‘info booth’ for player questions (moving the admin table to the side/middle of our area will help this for sure, as will some improved signage)
Consolidated daily schedule for reference (we had an hour-by-hour schedule of what was on each table, but it needs refinement for next year; go back to the basics and make a big easel with an event grid on it for the day)
Walk-up-and-play wargame table with something very light for quick pick-up play (we ran out of tables this year!)

Also from last year we had
To be improved for 2025: new signage that is Dragoons-specific but taller / more visible from a distance, and easier to stake out our specific area without interfering with visibility for walk-by traffic.
…which didn’t happen, but that was because we ran out of time to get the sign order in. We’re going to definitely work on this for next year and already have some plans in motion now.

From this year’s hotwash with our staff, we’ve got some new sustain/improve bullets

Some things to sustain for next year

Space around the tables, especially since wargamers can move around a lot as the games unfold
GM’s love the games they teach and the enthusiasm shows
Creative ways to market the space and build enthusiasm for attending
Pre-formatted event slips that minimize GM admin/record-keeping

Some things to improve for next year

Tables: Better match of game-to-table-size; more efficient use of the tables rather than leave unplayed games set up
Signage: “Players wanted” signs; events listed on table signs; publisher/non-Dragoons signage standards
GMs: time-of-day preferences from everyone; bring back the GM expectations/pre-flight cards
Rolling Games: players missed them; one-day rolling game with shorter session lengths for more rolling games?

Undoubtedly the “HIT” of the year at the Wargame HQ was the gumball machine.
“A gumball machine?!” you scoff
“Yes, by jove! A gumball machine!”

How about this: a gumball machine full of dice including a couple of special “chase dice” that you could redeem for extra raffle tickets⁷, and in the meantime you get to keep all the dice you get out of it?

So yeah, we filled it up with a whole lot of d6s of various sizes, a bunch of 10s, some other standard RPG dice, and a good scoop of collectible d20s from our great friends at Black Oak Workshop, and just turned people loose on it. Folks, we’re not going to tell you how much we made on that gumball machine because we don’t need Origins kicking our ass for it, but let’s just say the kids running the booth were very happy with the takeaway after we stopped at the bank on Tuesday morning to cash in their rolls of quarters.

We’re going to make a better plan for which dice are in the machine next year, but it is definitely coming back.

What The Wargaming Community Needs to Take Away From Origins 2025

Last year, we said the following:

We just put over 100 wargaming events in the main gaming hall at Origins, and pulled in about 300 total player sessions, for an event that wargamers insist isn’t for them.
We had games running from 8am–midnight, with at least 4 tables in use at all times between 10am–10pm.

You know what happened this year? Let’s edit:

We just put over ~~100~~ 170 wargaming events in the main gaming hall at Origins, and pulled in ~~about 300~~ over 450 total player sessions, for an event that wargamers continue insist isn’t for them.
We had games running from 8am–midnight across 20 total tables, with at least 4 7 tables in use at all times between 10am–10pm.

Don’t take it from us. Take it from Jason!

So yes, we’re looking right at YOU Multi-Man Publishing, and Columbia Games, and Compass Games, and Revolution Games, and Legion Wargames, and Worthington, and White Dog, and Lock ‘n Load, and Avalanche Press, and OSG, and Clash of Arms, and Accurate Simulations, and Cadet Games, and Fortress Games, and Marshal Enterprises, and all the rest of you stateside. And we know that VUCA Simulations, and Form Square Games, and Sound of Drums, and Draco Ideas, and NAC Wargames, and Hexasim, and Neva, and SNAFU, and Acies, and Ad Hoc, and DiSimula and Europa Simulazioni all have to get on planes to come join us and that’s expensive and we’re sensitive to that.

Don’t get a booth, or set up some big retail presence next year. But send someone to show up and see what we’re doing. Put a badge on someone and have them come walk around the Wargame HQ and take in all the wide variety of games, and gamers, that we’re putting on the table across 4-1/2 days of non-stop grognardiness.

If you decide it’s worth the effort to arrange for a retail presence at Origins after that, just know that you’ve got a welcoming and hard-working support team to help you make that happen, drive customers in your direction, and hype the ever-loving-hell out of your presence there.

We’ve got tables. We’ve got some GMs. We’ve got a friendly rally point and an experienced booth staff to run the HQ. We’ve got guaranteed tie-ins to the War College and an opportunity to not just play and teach games, but talk about the company and your plans and what’s next. And yeah, you can do some of that online, too, but it’s so much easier when you’ve got players, fans, GMs, tables, and (lots and lots of) dice all in one place for a full weekend hex-and-counter-palooza just waiting for you to make your next crop of fans.

Or don’t, and let another publisher take them off your hands for you 🤷

Origins 2025 Coverage
Wargame HQ Events ~ War College Previews ~ Wargame HQ Previews ~ Exhibitor Spotlight ~ All The Wargaming Events ~ The Final Countdown ~ Setup & First Games ~ The Charles S Roberts Awards ~ The View From Above ~ AAR for A&A Arnhem ~ The Kind Spirit ~ The AAR ~ Exhibit Hall

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Footnotes

one table was labeled “Bob & David & Chris & Ted” after the GMs that were scheduled on it 😆
a team that continues to grow!
the other slips we either forgot to record before turning in, or the GM took them directly to the Event HQ instead of bringing them to us first
higher is better
minimum 3 votes
For those that don’t know: every player in our games gets a raffle ticket they can put toward a game of their choice on our table, and on Sunday we send everything home with our gamers.
that was the kids’ idea and it was great